28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
OS and JEDGAR
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This story says a lot about the ITS ethos. On the ITS system there was a
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program that allowed you to see what was being printed on someone else's
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terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by examining the insides of the
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monitor system. The output spy program was called OS. Throughout the rest of
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the computer science world (and at IBM too) OS means operating system, but
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among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant output spy. OS could work
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because ITS purposely had very little in the way of protection that
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prevented one user from trespassing on another's areas. Fair is fair,
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however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if
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anyone started to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by
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looking at the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was
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looking at the insides that had to do with your output. This counterspy
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program was called JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables:
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/jedgr/ ), in honor of the former head of the FBI. But there's more. JEDGAR
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would ask the user for license to kill. If the user said yes, then JEDGAR
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would actually gun the job of the luser who was spying. Unfortunately,
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people found that this made life too violent, especially when tourists
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learned about it. One of the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing
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JEDGAR with another program that only pretended to do its job. It took a
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long time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To
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this day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been
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defanged. Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive
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as of late 1999 in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us
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whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
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